Pound Weighs in on Proposals to Revamp Doping Fight

(ATR) Former WADA president Richard Pound tells Around the Rings the global anti-doping body can build on the ideas presented at Saturday’s meeting.

Pound described the Olympic Summit outcomes as "pretty general".

"There is obviously recognition that WADA is the right answer, but there is not much flesh on the ideas, especially regarding where the funds required to do the job properly are to be found and mobilized," Pound told ATR.

Pound’s comments refer to a pledge in the declaration of the Olympic Summit to raise its financial contribution to fight doping. But there was little detail about how the IOC and its Olympic Movement partners – leading NOCs and international federations – will fund the increase in reforms of the global anti-doping system.

The focal point of the overhaul is to have an independent anti-doping testing system in operation by the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics.

Key proposals from the summit in Lausanne will increase WADA’s workload. Among them are harmonization of testing standards combined with more targeted testing and changes to WADA’s governance and giving it more intelligence and investigation powers.

WADA’s ruling body will discuss the new proposals next month, and Pound made it clear the agency would weigh in with its own contribution to revamping the anti-doping system.

"I think the WADA Foundation Board will be prepared to assess the ideas [of the Olympic Summit] and reach some preliminary conclusions, together with some specific questions that have not yet been answered, or perhaps even addressed," he told ATR. "No one has a monopoly on good ideas."

World Olympians Association Reacts

The WOA today backed the Olympic Summit’s recommendations and called on governments to invest significantly more money into anti-doping research and practice.

In the wake of the Russian doping scandal, which saw the country’s track and field stars banned from Rio along with athletes from other sports, the WOA also demanded further measures be put in place to support the rights of individual athletes to compete "if proven clean".

It said there was a need for "additional oversight" that allows clean athletes to compete even if their international federation, national Olympic committee or country have been sanctioned.

"We support the need for the establishment of an intelligence gathering unit… and also feel that more can be done to encourage and protect whistleblowers," a statement said.

WOA president Joël Bouzou said the summit proposals were "a positive step forward in the fight against doping in sport".

He was pleased to see two pillars of the WOA’s proposed three-point plan supported, namely the need to develop anti-doping testing that is fully independent of countries, sports and event organizers and dramatically increased funding for research into improved anti-doping testing.

"But we feel this could go further. We believe good governance, transparency and proper practice dictates two separate anti-doping organisations: one which carries out the global testing program and one which has oversight of the testing organisation to police the rules and their practical application and to ensure the highest possible standard of testing is achieved in order to provide a level playing field for all athletes," he said.

He said there was also a need to create a mechanism to better protect the rights of individual clean athletes if a country or sport was sanctioned. "Consensus on the best way to address this issue must be urgently sought so that clean athletes are not unfairly punished in future," he said.

Reported by Mark Bisson

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